My list of likely candidates wasn’t as long as I had feared, but was also not as long as I had hoped. If there weren’t many magazines in which it could have been printed – and surely many of them would be digitized already? – then the chances of finding “On Such a Night” grew exponentially smaller.

I identified about fifteen publications that might be potential hunting grounds, from Adam and Eve to Woman, and I began eliminating them by the simple expedient of first checking if they had already been digitized, and if they had not, combing through them issue by issue with painstaking and careful precision, one, two, even three rolls of microfilm, each covering at least six months of a publication, per session, ten days in a row. By the end of it, I’d searched nine publications in their entirety (for the most probable period), but some were unavailable at my location, and I’d variously need to travel to the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane and the National Library of Australia in Canberra in order to check those final possibilities off my list.

In the meantime, I had greatly enjoyed the search, and my immersion in that previous time. I’d loved seeing the articles on the changing roles of women, discovering new writers, seeing the gorgeous outfits on sale for ludicrous prices, and skimming over remarkably familiar-sounding advertorials on “slimming” and make up and “how to keep your man.” (Often all three at once.)

But with my interstate trips now booked for a couple of weeks away, I decided to return to my radio-based search, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to peruse the Wireless Weekly, in which Dorothea Vautier had so often and prominently been featured. It occurred to me then that I hadn’t actually thought to look further into the magazine the week that “On Such a Night” was broadcast – maybe there’d been some kind of advertisement of the story in its pages? After all, Georgette Heyer was an ever-rising star in women’s fiction at the time – and was already a best-seller in anyone’s language – and so it seemed impossible to me that any story of hers would be given short shrift by any right-thinking editor and consigned either to the back of a magazine, or completely ignored by some lucky radio station’s advertising department.

It was only as I began to sift through that edition of the Wireless Weekly did I notice an oddity. “On Such a Night” wasn’t only broadcast on Monday, December 6, 1937; it was broadcast every day that week. Not on Saturday and Sunday, but every weekday, from Friday, December 3 through to Thursday, December 7. Now, it would make sense to maybe broadcast a short story multiple times, to give those who missed it a chance to tune in, the kind of thing TV networks used to invariably do before streaming and binge-watching came along and foiled their repeated episode model. But to repeat the story every day across two different weeks? That seemed… odd.